---
# System prepended metadata

title: Hologram AI Postmortem
tags: [experiments, failed startups, post mortem]

---

# Background

On March '23 I (@mpj) reached out to Daniel on my interest to build a startup on the AI-space. I am confident because I'm equipped with

- My little fundraising experience helping startups raising in Stacks Accelerator in 2021.
- A spark of energy and excitement around AI when ChatGPT hyped.
- The idea is to figure out early traction and then fundraise.

Daniel offered me a funding of $25k for two projects - which involved AI. This offer is so good and I took it.

# What was the idea

Original idea from me:

- AI girlfriend / AI friend
- Tools to help with AI art (prompt playground)

Idea from Daniel & Nicole:

- NFT Marketplace on Gnosis (taken but dropped)
- GnosisGPT (not taken)
- CrewAI (taken but pivoted)
- Hologram (run until July '23)

# Funding till-date

We spent $11666.9 funding from Daniel and Nicole and another self-funding of $10k from our own pocket totalling $21666.9 in funding.

# The longest running experiment: Hologram AI

The idea of Hologram is to provide user with ways to generate image easily using pay-to-generate with crypto and easy NFT minting. The idea is people are interested in minting AI-generated image if the image is beautiful or have some art value.

# What we don't accomplished

- We don't experiment fast enough on Gnosis GPT and NFT Marketplace for Gnosis
- Deliver CrewAI as fast possible when it was still hyped
- We then pivoted to Hologram but couldn't delivery web3-related feature on time since most of our team member is new to Web3 and smart contract. While I don't have enough time to be very hands on while doing research and finding business opportunities.

# What we have accomplished

- Won the Gateway.fm challenge in the [Gnosis x Encode Hackathon](https://medium.com/encode-club/encode-x-gnosis-hackathon-prizewinners-and-summary-c8e834aea325), winning $1k of bounty.
- Acquired paying user, in-total only [$2 in revenue](https://gnosisscan.io/address/0xd54E6A61332657eCac42146f226e44C6166C86bE)
- Getting some community members in [Discord](https://discord.com/invite/Nf6Pb7sfuJ) around 30+ users.
- Launched our waitlist program and [alpha application](https://tryhologram.art/)
- In our database in total we have 81 users and 18 users in NFT waitlist.
- Have people [minted our NFT](https://niftyfair.io/gc/collection/0x45632949a5b0e576914232b2908f84d5c5ef005c/). About 10 NFTs are minted by external users.

# What we should do differently

- Having complete cross-functional team in the beginning. The lack of good designer is one of the factor we can't delivery good product faster.
- Startup is time consuming so I should do it with more time commitment. Day job + new born + startup nights and weekends is something I couldn't do long-term.
- Pick the right team. The team that I have when running Hologram, while very nimble, is not setup for success. For example:
  - I should find better partner
  - Should have engineer with web3 background
  - Should have more senior engineer that can delivery with more autonomy

# What I will do next

- Take a break
- Researching on new things that fit my experience and strength to work on.
- Build then fundraise, not the other way around

# Summary

Doing startup is hard, failure is expected and the best way to handle failure is to stop the bleeding before it's too late. In this post-mortem I shared how Hologram failed to deliver the goal of buildling an AI tool that user wants either for conversational bot or for Art (Hologram).

While I learned more about what can make Hologram a good product, I realized that Hologram team as of today is not positioned for success and not very comptitive. Thus, before the bleeding not cureable, I decided to pull the trigger and go back to the drawing board.

I will be taking a break, researching what I will do next and most definitely building a new stuff that I hope people want. I forever grateful for Daniel and Nicole who give us chance to try to innovate and also to the team who have faith in me to make it work. I proud to what we have accomplishd so far and very inspired by the team dedication on delivering product at their limit of capability.
